Chapter 292

ALEXANDER

The second we stepped inside, the fucking alarm screamed to life.

A high, shrieking wail tore through the warehouse and announced our presence to every bastard still breathing inside.

“What the fuck—”

My blood ran cold, then ignited with pure, self-directed fury.

Stupid.

Careless.

Fucking stupid.

I had been so locked on getting to her — so blinded by the need to reach Alina — that I hadn’t checked the door.

Hadn’t tested for a silent trigger, pressure plate, magnetic contact, or any of the basic shit I would have caught in my sleep on any other job.

I had let the rage and the clock in my head override the discipline that had kept me alive for years.

And now every man inside this building knew we were here.

Gunfire exploded before I could finish the thought.

Bullets ripped through the air, chewing into metal beams and concrete pillars. Muzzle flashes lit the dark in sharp, violent bursts. Santos hadn’t been as stupid as I’d thought.

The paranoid fuck had been ready for us the whole time — and I’d been the one who walked straight in and rang the fucking bell for him.

I hit the ground hard, shoulder cracking against the cold concrete a fraction of a second before a bullet slammed into the wall above me.

Dust and concrete shards rained down. I growled low in my throat, already returning fire. My first shot took the man in front of me clean through the chest. He dropped without a sound.

You absolute fucking idiot

You knew better than this. You’ve done this a hundred times. And the one time it actually matters — the one time she’s the one on the other side of the door — you walk in like an amateur and hand them the alarm on a platter.

I shoved the self-loathing down hard and brought my weapon up. No time for it now. The damage was done. The only thing left was to end this before Santos could use the chaos against her.

No time for mercy. No time for anything but speed.

I pushed up and moved, Leo tight on my right. More men poured from the shadows between stacked pallets and rusted machinery, rifles up, firing as they closed in.

The warehouse was a wide, open kill box — high ceilings, broken skylights letting in thin slices of moonlight, long rows of abandoned crates and old conveyor belts creating uneven cover. The air already stank of gunpowder and blood.

I fired without hesitation. Legs. Necks. Heads. Whatever dropped them fastest.

A man came around a forklift with his weapon raised; I put two in his throat before he could squeeze the trigger.

Another tried to flank from the left — Dante dropped him with a clean shot to the temple.

Bullets sparked off metal all around us. One grazed the edge of a steel support beam near my shoulder, sending a hot shard of metal across my cheek. I barely felt it.

“Keep pushing!” I barked over the chaos. “Flush them out!”

We advanced in short, brutal bursts, using every scrap of cover the place offered.

Dante and Vincent peeled off toward the far side, cutting down two more men who tried to hold a doorway.

The shooting was constant now — a rolling, deafening storm of automatic fire and answering single shots from our side.

Empty shells clattered across the concrete. Someone screamed. Someone else gurgled and went silent.

I put a round through a man’s knee as he tried to retreat, then finished him when he hit the ground. No chances. Not tonight.

Leo moved like he’d been born for this — calm, precise, lethal. When a shooter popped up from behind a stack of rotting wooden crates, Leo’s bullet took him in the eye before the man could fully raise his rifle.

More of Santos’s men kept coming, but the numbers were thinning. Bodies littered the floor between the machinery. Blood pooled in dark, spreading stains under the weak emergency lights.

When the last visible shooter on the main floor went down, I didn’t lower my weapon.

“Dante! Vincent! Search fucking everything!” I roared, my voice echoing through the building.

“Lower level, offices, storage rooms, every corridor, every fucking corner—tear this place apart if you have to!”

I pointed toward the darkened hallway.

“Find her! FIND. MY. WIFE. NOW!”

They moved instantly, boots pounding across the concrete and up a metal staircase that clung to the far wall.

Leo and I stayed on the main floor, clearing what was left. One wounded man tried to crawl toward a dropped rifle; I put a bullet in the back of his head without breaking stride.

Dante came running down the stairs first, his face tight with frustration.

“She’s not in the back rooms. Offices are clear. Nothing upstairs.”

Vincent appeared behind him, breathing hard.

“First floor is clear too. No sign of Alina. No sign of Santos.”

For a second, I simply stared at them. My brain refused to process the words.

"What the fuck did you just say?”

“She’s not here, boss.”

I yanked the tracker from my pocket. The red dot still pulsed steadily, almost directly under our feet according to the signal.

“She’s fucking here,” I snarled, shoving the screen toward them. “The tracker is still live. She’s in this fucking building. You’re not looking hard enough — search again!”

Panic and rage tangled so tightly in my chest I could barely breathe. I spun away from them and started moving myself, gun up, sweeping every shadow, every possible hiding place the warehouse offered.

The main floor was a graveyard of old industry — massive steel support columns, abandoned assembly lines coated in dust, stacks of warped pallets, and a row of heavy metal doors that led into smaller storage rooms.

I kicked the first one open. Empty. The second smelled of mold and machine oil. Empty. The third had a broken desk and a dead fluorescent light swinging from the ceiling. Nothing.

I took the metal stairs two at a time, heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

The upper level was a narrow catwalk overlooking the main floor, with a string of small offices and a larger glass-walled room that might once have been a supervisor’s station.

I tore through every one of them, ripping open closets, checking under desks, behind filing cabinets that hadn’t been moved in years.

Nothing. No Alina.No Santos.

Just dust, rust, and the distant echo of the alarm still screaming downstairs.

I slammed my fist into a wall hard enough to crack the plaster.

“Wife,” I muttered under my breath, the word tasting like blood and failure. “Where the fuck are you?”

My lungs felt too small. Every breath scraped. The tracker still insisted she was here, somewhere in this rotting skeleton of a building, and yet we had torn the place apart and found only bodies and empty rooms.

I was so deep inside my own head — so lost in the rising terror that maybe we had somehow missed her, that Santos had already moved her, that I was too late again — that I never heard the soft scrape of boots behind me.

“Boss!” Leo’s shout cut through the noise a second too late.

I spun. A man I hadn’t seen — one who must have been hiding in the ceiling crawl space or some overlooked alcove — stood ten feet away with his pistol already leveled at my chest.

I tried to bring my own weapon up. Tried to drop. Tried to do anything.

The gunshot cracked through the warehouse like a thunderclap.

Pain exploded through my right thigh, white-hot and immediate. My leg buckled. I hit the floor hard, a raw shout tearing out of my throat.

“Fuck!”

Blood was already soaking through my pants, hot and fast. The shooter never got a second round off — Leo put two in his chest before the man could adjust his aim. The body dropped.

I gritted my teeth, one hand clamped over the wound, the other still gripping my gun as I tried to push myself up.

The pain was vicious, radiating up into my hip and down toward my knee, but it was nothing compared to the colder fear still clawing at my ribs.

Leo was already at my side, face grim, applying pressure to the wound with practiced hands.

“You okay, Boss?”

“I'm fine. Just a fucking nick,” I muttered. It was a lie. The bullet had gone clean through the meat of my thigh. It burned like fire and every heartbeat sent a fresh pulse of pain up into my hip, but I didn’t have time for it.

“What now Boss?” Vincent asked, expression tight.

My eyes swept the warehouse one last time — the open floor, the upper offices, the storage rooms we had already torn apart. Nothing. No Alina. No Santos.

We had looked everywhere.

Had Santini lied to us? Or had Santos already moved her before we even arrived?

The thought made something ugly and violent twist in my chest. I had never wanted to hurt someone as badly as I did in that moment. I was going to lose my fucking mind if I didn’t find her soon.

"The tracker says she's supposed to be fucking here," I snarled, shoving the screen toward them so hard Vincent nearly dropped it. "Look again. Run it again. She's here — the dot's sitting right in the middle of this lot, so tell me why I'm looking at empty fucking buildings."

Vincent didn't look at the screen right away. He looked at me first, which was how I knew whatever he was about to say, he'd already been dreading it for the last ten minutes.

"Boss." He said it carefully, like he was setting something down that might go off. "What if he found it?"

"Found what."

"The tracker." He held my stare, which took more nerve than most men had left around me tonight.

"What if Santos found out about the tracker, pulled it, and dropped it here on purpose? Set the whole location up to look right so we'd walk straight into it — while he's already got her somewhere else entirely."

Fuck.

It was possible. Too possible. And it would explain why the signal was screaming that she was right under our feet while every room we searched came up empty.

I shoved the thought down and forced myself upright. Pain flared white-hot through my leg the second I put weight on it.

I gritted my teeth and limped forward anyway, scanning the floor, the walls, anything we might have missed in the chaos.

What the fuck do I do now?

My boot caught on the edge of a heavy, dust-caked rug near the center of the main floor. I staggered, nearly went down, and caught myself hard against a steel support beam. Cursing under my breath, I glared at the damned thing, ready to rip it apart with my bare hands out of pure frustration.

Then I stopped. The rug had bunched up around my feet when I tripped. Underneath it, partially exposed, was the unmistakable outline of a wooden hatch set into the concrete.

My eyebrows drew together. I shoved the rug aside completely with my good leg.

A square wooden door, reinforced with metal bands, sat flush with the floor. No handle on top — the kind of hidden access meant to be opened from below or with a specific tool.

Dante swore under his breath behind me.

“Fuck…”

Viktor stepped closer, staring at the closed hatch. The rug hadn’t been there for decoration.

It had been there to hide something.

I stared down at the door in the floor, heart slamming hard against my ribs all over again.

There you are.